Verse of the Day

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:43-45, ESV)

About: kraig

Some questions just get right to the core. But when they come from your 15 year old son, unexpectedly, they can really catch you off guard. We’re driving home Sunday from church. Enjoying the beautiful countryside of Franklin, Tennessee. Out of the blue, my son asks this question from the backseat, “Dad. You and Mom have been married for twenty years almost. Is life better or worse than you thought it would be twenty years ago?” Wow. Great question!

This series of posts is winding up. It’s a story of abandonment to hope in my personal relationship between me and my earthly father. But it’s a metaphor for the Gospel too. As I’ve covered previously, the wound of abandonment led me to restlessness; which mercifully led to a release of the Spirit, finally resulting in me being reconciled to my earthly father, the original source of my abandonment. Once God released me of my anger I immediately felt compassion toward my earthly father. My hatred and bitterness toward him were gone. Compassion replaced hatred. So, I tracked him down […]

If you’ve been following this series of posts (i.e., From abandonment to hope). The last post focused on how feeling abandoned leads one to a sense and perhaps even a lifestyle, or approach to life, of restlessness. To be a restless person, one feels like a spiritual vagabond. It’s the James 1:6 principle of having “two minds”. For me at least, I cultivated this approach to life until I was almost 39 years old. I could see its effects in my life but felt powerless to change it deeply. Instead, I expressed internal power through an illegitmate way – ANGER! […]

My first post set the foundation for the defining theme of my life for the first 39 years: abandonment. The main point of this post is to communicate that a feeling of abandonment in one’s life, leads to restlessness. From my earliest days, even well into adulthood (and post-conversion) I was living out my core identity as one who felt abandoned (i.e., rejected by my earthly father), A sense of abandonment, deeply embedded in the soul, causes one to ask questions like these: Why was I not worthy to be loved? I guess I have to earn love. How do […]

I’m going to start telling a long story. This post is the first installment. It’s a story of God reconciling me to my earthly father after having been abandoned by him for almost 40 years. This post will start at the beginning. I was born October 11, 1962 – thankfully. Had my father had his way I might have been aborted, at least as I hear it. But God knew my days even in my mother’s womb, and He had a plan for my life. But a newborn with two other kids, under the age of three, was just too […]

I was driving home the other day with my almost 16 year old son, Matt. He’s a sophomore now and probably starting to give a lot of thought to what to do with his life. So I decided to probe. “Matt. So you think you have any idea what God’s purpose is for your life?” “Sure,” He responded. As if I had just asked the dumbest question in the world. “Okay,” I said. “Enlighten me oh enlightened-one.” “I want to be a Bible translator and preach the Word of God.” Wow! “That’ll do pig, that’ll do!”

Celebrating Father’s Day without your father alive is . . . . wierd. I just assume skip FD every year, except for the fact that I am too a father, and my kids also like giving me funking ties or a DVD on my “favs list”. I had two fathers. #1 was my step-Dad and he was my “father” for 34 years. He died of lung cancer in 1996. #2 was my real-Dad with whom I reconciled to within weeks of his death to liver disease in 2001. I remember playing softball in a church league in 1973. I was […]

I love being a Dad, well, most of the time. I have three man-cubs. 16, 15 and 10. I simply wanted to share that it’s fun being a father. I was in Border’s for lunch today. My favorite post-launch stopping grounds. A cup of coffee. Browsing the new hardbacks. By the way, never buy a paperback, they’re magazines. Always buy the real thing in a hard back spine. But I digress. Anyway, I’m browsing through the titles. I stumble upon Chosen by a Horse. Knowing that my 16 year old daughter would love this book, I promptly walked to the […]

Do you remember what you got on your 15th birthday? Didn’t think so. My son will never forget his though. His was this past Friday. It’s not because he got what he wanted, an iPod video. It’s because he got more than he wanted. And I don’t mean in the consumer electronics department. We gave him a little brother. We sponsored a child in his honor from World Vision. His name is Layan. He lives in Kenya. What do you get an American kid who has everything? C’mon now, kids in America are very blessed. Parents of kids in America […]

Okay, I’m old. I admit it. At least older than a lot of you on this site. But I digress. My oldest daughter, Rebecca, is graduating from high school. Early. Way too early. She is only 16. She’s a smart cookie. Took the ACT first when she was twelve years old and scored higher than the average entering college freshman that year. Brains. Probably from her mother. I digress again, but that was really a subtle form of bragging wasn’t it? So Becca will be leaving home soon. So thoughts of, “Have we been successul raising Rebecca?” have started to […]